Woman pleads guilty in Fast and Furious case

In this Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2010 picture, an American flag on a resident's home waves in the breeze near a U.S. Border Patrol truck blocking the road leading to a search area near where U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry, 40, was killed northwest of Nogales, Ariz. (AP Photo/Arizona Daily Star, Greg Bryan)

PHOENIX (AP) — A woman has pleaded guilty to aiding a gun smuggling that was being monitored as part of the government’s botched investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious.

Kristi Gail Ireland pleaded to a charge of aiding and abetting the crime of making false statements in a gun purchase.

She faces up to five years in prison.

Ireland admitted that she accompanied an alleged ring member in 2010 to a gun shop for a buy, carried $18,000 in her purse for the purchase and knew that the alleged ring member lied when making the purchase.

Twelve people in the alleged 20-member ring have pleaded guilty.

Authorities faced criticism for allowing suspected straw gun buyers to walk away from shops with weapons, rather than arrest the suspects and seize the guns there.

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“Fast and Furious” Pseudo-Scandal: Right Wing Reverses Course on Guns
I haven’t followed the Fast and Furious pseudo scandal all that closely because it seemed so unlikely to me that it could be the one to metastasize into a Village feeding frenzy. Why? Well, here’s a concise description of the case:

Fast and Furious, which started in 2009, was the misbegotten gun-trafficking operation in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed weapons to “walk,” or flow to Mexican drug cartels in the hopes of busting higher-ups in the organization. As many as 2,000 guns were lost in the botched sting and two of them turned up at the sight of a shootout that cost the life of a U.S. border agent. The operation was run out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Phoenix.

It honestly never occurred to me that the right could turn this one into a cause celebre. After all, haven’t we been told for decades that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?” Of all the hissy fits they might stage, freaking out over the origin of some guns just slays me. This has to be the only crime in history in which these right wing gun fetishists give a damn about the fact that guns got in the hands of criminals and someone was killed.

These are the same people who cheered this, after all:

Ashcroft ordered that all government lists — including voter registration, immigration and driver’s license lists — be checked for links to terrorists. But there was one list Ashcroft did not want used – the gun purchasers background check.

Every person who buys a gun from a dealer must pass an instant criminal background check. It’s called the National Instant Criminal Background check system or NICS. The records of those checks are kept by the FBI. After September 11th, the ATF wanted to review those records to see if any suspected terrorists had bought guns.”